


Salient

by omphale23



Category: Chasing Rainbows
Genre: Community: ds_snippets, Gen, Snippets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-14
Updated: 2010-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 23:56:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fairy tale mists, pretty and strange. In the trenches they pointed and wondered at sudden silence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salient

**Author's Note:**

> [](http://slidellra.livejournal.com/profile)[**slidellra**](http://slidellra.livejournal.com/) quite rightly criticized my commas, for which you should be grateful. Fair warning that this is not a happy, slashy fic.

_Langemark_

Fog. It was eerie. Waves of green. Fairy tale mists, pretty and strange. In the trenches they pointed and wondered at sudden silence.

It arrived and his lungs drowned the sound of dying. They had nothing. No masks, no warning, no war wounds.

He ignored the past, made light of the cough, and became someone else. Created a new man to replace the boy crying and choking that day.

Everyone else had gone west.

 

_Vimy_

Noise. Noise and no way to escape, no song to conceal that roar. It was the noise he would not forget.

It was the filthy resignation as he slumped, angry and tired and bleeding and dying. They both were, but Kincaid was too stupid to lie down and instead kept moving, crawling through wet earth, _la boue_, that would never dry and accomplishing the impossible because he could.

He had no one to lose.

 

_Passchendaele_

Rain. Rain, mud, craters, rain, muck, screams. Thunder like sudden storms back home, turning the grimy streets to mire. Here it was shells and never, ever did his ears stop ringing.

They were right. War made him the equal of anyone. Equally tired, equally damp, equally miserable, covered every goddamn day in the mud and blood and pain of men dying.

Sometimes he forgot what home was, beyond the chant _it is not here._


End file.
